Serious response: the Vicksburg Campaign is not taught in history classes these days. My son graduated recently from a top high school in Texas, and his American history class spent maybe one week covering the period between Nat Turner, the escalation to war, and the war itself. Personally, I think the Nat Turner rebellion is an important catalyst event in Southern History that sent the Southern States into a tyrannical xenophobic spiral which would persist for nearly 150 years. We have many important lessons we could learn by studying Nat Turner and the Southern response to his rebellion, I’m sure none of which were learned by mentioning Nat Turner as a passing footnote in a 40 minute discussion.

Aggravating the situation is that the study of military campaigns is not “in style” in academic history these days, which means that most battle/campaign histories are written by amateur historians. For this reason, the Vicksburg historiography for the past 25 years has been fairly flawed and somewhat derivative in nature. Like tykes sitting at a glowing hearth listening to tales of David and Goliath, everyone seems to love the telling and retelling of “Grant the Bulldog” mired in the swamps but refusing to admit defeat, incorrect as the story may be.

If you ever make it back to Vicksburg, be sure to look me up. I would be more than happy to give you a personal tour if I can carve time away from work. Be warned though … my vernacular is “modern surfer” so if you have trouble understanding “Grant landed at Milliken’s Bend and thought DUDE! This city is like so vulnerable from the interior it’s SICK!” you may need a translator.

There are several battlefields within 30 miles of where you were standing, none of them actually in Vicksburg … Chickasaw Bayou battlefield, Milliken’s Bend battlefield, Port Gibson battlefield, Grand Gulf battlefield, Raymond battlefield, Champion Hill battlefield, Big Black River Bridge battlefield. In Vicksburg itself, there really wasn’t much of a battle … just a protracted seige punctuated by a handful of assaults.

However, local people refer to several locations by the name “battlefield:” there has been the Battlefield Mall, Battlefield Theatre, Battlefield aparments, Battlefield Campground, Battlefield Museum, Battlefield Hotel, and Battlefield Discount Drugs … just to rattle a few off the top of my head.

Probably if you were smart enough to ask for “the battlefield” by name you would have gotten better results. I think 10 out of 10 could have told you how to get to the Vicksburg National Military Park.

I don’t take offense to your comment about my HOME — where I was born and raised until my family relocated to the west coast in 1985.

It’s all about the vernacular — get with it or get left behind. You asked to see the battlefield and you did! You could have also went down Drummond Street, over to Urban Courts, Lane St., “the Bottom”….hmmm, you would been okay , Halls Ferry Road – there are the untold stories of how people dugged caves on the side of hills to protect themselvs and their possession. You not being a local — you wouldn’t know that!

If by chance you decide to EVER go back – just ask for the Military Park!
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***Could it possibly be that you were in your own paradigm and you asked to see the “battlefield” thinking that it was just “a little plot of land ” in which fighting took place? It seems to me you where going off the “little knowlege” you have of Vicksburg too. In short, battlefield is more than just the park you where looking for.

Welcome to the Vicksburg National Military Park website.

Vicksburg National Military Park commemorates the campaign, siege and defense of Vicksburg. Vicksburg was a fortress located on high ground guarding the Mississippi River. Its surrender on July 4, 1863, coupled with the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana, divided the South, and gave the North undisputed control of the Mississippi River. The Vicksburg battlefield includes 1,330 monuments and markers, a 16 mile tour road, a restored Union gunboat, and a National Cemetery.

My criticism isn’t explicit to Vicksburg — it’s just the particular anecdote I chose. It’s not even, as you might think, an assault on the failings of the “unwashed masses”. In the end, it’s an attack on the failed education system of this country.

“Ignorant” does not mean evil, or uncaring. You appear to be arguing against something I did not say.

Also, for the record, I am not a southerner, though to paraphrase the late Louis Grizzard: “I was a prisoner of war for four years in New Orleans.” :p

“I have to take exception to your rant. Could it be that you did not ask the correct question?”

If any one of them had said “There are battlefields all around you,” or “Which one?”, or something of that nature, I would have agreed with that assessment.

Perhaps my example of not knowing Lake Michigan from Chicago was off — a better example perhaps to go to Smalltown, Illinois and ask where the corn fields are. A local would probably laugh and say “All over the place”, not “There are no cornfields.”

To be very clear, I don’t think the problem is particular to Vicksburg — it was just a particularly egregious anecdotal example. You have demonstrated your clear understanding of the history of the War, but I would be very surprised if the average Vicksburger (Vicksburgian?) shares anything near that level of historical expertise. The same situation exists throughout the country.

As I said above — “When was it that kids stopped studying ‘History’ in favor of ‘Social Studies’?” Our government works furiously to indoctrinate our kids with socialist pablum, and very little to teach them the history that got us where we are today. You can’t possibly know where you are if you don’t know where you’ve been.

There was/is yet no one battlefield that signifies the colossal front surrounding the City of Vicksburg. Rather, within what we (and the Feds) call “the Military Park,” there are many distinct sites where pitched battles and assaults occurred. In fact, there were many more battles in and around Vicksburg over Grant’s two year campaign leading up to the final seige and capitulation during the Summer of 1863. You see, Grant was like a bulldog, once he got into the fight, he never relented. He tried to take the city from every conceivable angle, including the river, but generally (pardon the pun) came away from each encounter with his nose rather bloodied. In my opinion the decision of Confederate General Pemberton to surrender the town had as much to do with the toll the siege was taking on the civilian inhabitants and the decision of General Johnston to abandon Vicksburg, leaving little hope for survival, as it did the relative success Grant was having with his frontal assaults on the city’s seige lines.

I question the galantry of an army in the field like Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, when they take the war to the civilian populace by raining down deadly fire, not on military objectives, but on civilian targets. I likewise question your rationale for denigrating fellow Southerners in the manner of your August 1, 2005 blog, which, incidentally was written several weeks before Katrina bludgeoned the Mississippi Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Those same good people whom you deemed “Ignorant” offered aid and care to the many refugees who fled north from New Orleans to escape the horrors of Katrina.
God bless you and God help you, sir.
Knaveheart (Vicksburg, Mississippi)